When I arrived at the Red Gate office one morning, I was met by Rachel, the person who looks after Red Gate's presence at conferences and community events, in a rage. Believe me it's not a situation I want to be involved with again in the near future. Or the medium, or long term future for that matter.

What could be the matter? Rather than my usual approach of saying the wrong thing and making the situation worse, I decided to keep out of the way for a while.

Shortly afterwards we all got this email from Rachel:

"I just wanted to let you know that I've had a few email problems yesterday, and I've lost almost everything from the past 2 ½ years. Anyway, the point is this: my life is in my inbox and so I’m going to have a few large gaps in my memory. My apologies in advance if there is anything that you need that I no longer have."

To cope with her large volumes of messages regarding user groups and community events that she needs to refer to every now and again, Rachel has been saving her messages to PST files.

All was working just fine until Rachel encountered a problem with Outlook and Word no longer speaking to each other (come on – grow up!). To try and fix the problem Dave, one of our knowledgeable SysAdmins, got on the case:

"Rachel was having some very annoying problems with Outlook and Word that whilst not actually being critical from a technical viewpoint (as in needing to rebuild Windows or likely to make anything else go wrong) were clearly very irritating for her. Her default Word template kept corrupting so whenever she tried to write an email she would get errors. Then the editor would not behave normally because by default Word is used as the email editor for Outlook.

It's still not totally clear what was corrupting the Word or Outlook profiles but I tried quite a few well known solutions like rebuilding these profiles and reinstalling office, etc. None of these solutions lasted past the next reboot, so each day the problem would return. Then I tried rebuilding her entire Windows profile which I did by taking a backup copy and then deleting her current one and logging her on again which made a fresh profile."

Problem fixed. Result! But no, where were the PSTs? 'They've gone – help!' pleaded Rachel to Tech Support.

For the best part of a week, there were often (well, at least 50% of the time) two chairs at Rachel's desk – Rachel sometimes in a rage, sometimes on the verge of tears with frustration – and Dave the SysAdmin, trying to resolve the issue and find the missing files.

Despite trying everything they could, and investing many, many hours, the PSTs were gone forever. Dave explained the situation:

"It turned out that Rachel had one PST file on her network drive that Support had created about 2 or 3 years ago to archive old emails as she had a large mailbox. Since then she'd just been clicking the default action to add more archives. It turns out that this puts them in the default location (which is a hidden file in your Windows profile on your C drive). The files should have been in the backup but we couldn't find them anywhere and it wasn't obvious what had happened to them.

Using an undelete program we couldn't find any evidence it had been deleted. We're still not clear on what happened to them."

The trouble with Exchange and PSTs

Our Exchange Admin gave us the full technical background to this problem:

"We all know about the fundamental problem with Exchange in that it gets upset if you have too many emails. The only solution is to get users with large mailboxes to back up to PST files.

However, if PSTs get too large, they can start to corrupt so the best thing to do is regularly make new archives, which Rachel was doing. She thought they were going onto the network where the original one was created but instead they were going on to her local hard drive which wasn't backed up.

When the problem occurred we lost the PST files and thus her archive of old emails. In my opinion, it's a fundamental problem of Exchange/Outlook that it leaves solving the problem of mailbox size up to end-users. Exchange/Outlook lets them do it in such a way that can let them bypass the fault tolerance of their mail servers since it takes their nicely backed up email off the mail servers and puts it on the local hard drive.

You end up in a situation where if anything happens to the machine (theft/accident/hard drive/rogue SysAdmin), they'll lose their emails adding to the already serious problem. End-users don't want to know about archiving and the 'fundamental problems with Exchange' and it is not their fault that these things go wrong. They just want email that always works."

After much over-reacting on Rachel's part (a typical Taurean female when it comes to dealing with unplanned situations), the cacophony of noise calmed a little when Rachel received the following message from a sympathetic colleague:

"Ouch! Aiee! It doesn't bear thinking about. I can't even imagine what I’d do if that happened to me. Lots of sympathy.  I have a copy of everything you’ve ever sent me, kept in a metaphorical rose-scented envelope under my metaphorical pillow. If I send it back, is that any help at all? (If everyone did that, you’d be almost back up and running, but with horrendous problems with duplicates)."

Editor's note: If only you'd had an Exchange archiving tool! No need for PSTs and never lose an email again. Check out Exchange Server Archiver.

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